The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (9 page)

DRUGSTORE COW

 

New Rule:
Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out.  Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me.

This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants.

This week in
American Scientist,
a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote
Sgt. Pepper
—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one.

I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.”

 

 

—March 30, 2007

 

CTRL+ALT+ELITE

 

New Rule:
Now that liberals have taken back the word “liberal,” they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite media,” and the “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is overly influenced by the “Hollywood elite.” So basically, unless you’re a shit-kicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being “elite,” you’d be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.

I don’t get it: In other fields—outside of government—elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad—the elite aren’t down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains.

Which is fine, except that whenever there’s a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, “Where are they getting these screwups from?” Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I’m not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College—you know, home of the “Fighting Christies”—and then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school.

Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause “earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” has a law school. And what kid wouldn’t want to attend? It’s three years, and you have to read only one book.
U.S. News & World Report,
which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It’s not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn’t get into the University of Phoenix.

Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? One hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We’re talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we’ve gone from “we the people” to “up with people.” From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson’s law school? The problem here in America isn’t that the country is being run by elites. It’s that it’s being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

 

 

—April 13, 2007

 

BIO-DEBATABLE

 

New Rule:
From now on, Earth Day really must be a year-round thing. And in honor of this Earth Day, starting Monday, supermarket clerks must stop putting the big bottle of detergent with a handle on it in a plastic bag. I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but you see that handle you just lifted the detergent with? I can use that
same
handle to carry the detergent to my car. And stop putting my liquor in a smaller paper sack before you put it in the big paper sack with my other stuff. What, are you afraid my groceries will think less of me if they see I’ve been drinking? Trust me, the broccoli doesn’t care, and the condoms already know.

Here’s a quote from Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” Well, guess what? The bees are disappearing. In massive numbers. All around the world. And if you think I’m being alarmist and that “Oh, they’ll figure out some way to pollinate the plants . . .” No, they’ve tried. For a lot of what we eat, only bees work. And they’re not working. They’re gone. It’s called colony collapse disorder, when the hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, and all that’s left are a few queens and some immature workers—like when a party winds down at Elton John’s house.

But I think we’re the ones suffering from colony collapse disorder. Because although nobody really knows for sure what’s killing the bees, it’s not Al Qaeda, and it’s not God doing some of his Old Testament shtick, and it’s not Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s us. It could be from pesticides, or genetically modified food, or global warming, or the high-fructose corn syrup we started to feed them. Recently, it was discovered that bees won’t fly near cell phones—the electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees’ navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So thanks, bigmouth in line at Starbucks, you just killed us. It’s nature’s way of saying, “Can you hear me now?”

Recently I asked: If it solved global warming, would you give up the TV remote and go back to carting your ass over to the television set every time you wanted to change the channel? If it comes down to the cell phone vs. the bee, will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death?

Will we continue to tell ourselves that we don’t have to solve environmental problems—we can just adapt: build seawalls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don’t save the creatures of the earth and oceans, just learn to eat the slime and jellyfish that nothing can kill, like Chinese restaurants are already doing.

Maybe you don’t need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don’t need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out one hundred billion plastic bags a year, and they all take a thousand years to decompose. Your children’s children’s children will never know you, but they’ll know you once bought batteries at the 99 cent store, because the bag will still be caught in a tree. Except there won’t be any trees. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees, because without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine, and we make bad canaries, because we’re already such sheep.

 

 

—April 20, 2007